Dateline: April 24, 2008

Holocaust survivor shares story at CC 

By Roger Estlack, Clarendon Enterprise

A Jewish survivor of the Holocaust said the hope for a peaceful world is in the hands of Americans as he recounted his experiences in Nazi labor camps last Thursday.

Tibor Stern, an 83-year-old native of Transylvania, told Clarendon College students in the Harned Sisters Fine Arts Center that he was 17 when he tried to escape his homeland with the intention of joining the British Army and fighting the Germans.

“When you’re young, you think you’re invincible and nothing can hurt you,” Stern said.

But he soon found out that he was not invincible when he was arrested trying to cross the border into Romania and taken by car to the headquarters of the Gestapo.

“They thought I was a spy,” Stern said. “They laid me on a table and tied my hands and feet. They beat my legs, back, and buttocks with a steel rod, trying to get the answer they wanted. But I stuck to my story.”

When they finally gave up, Stern could no longer stand and had to crawl on his hands and knees down the hall. He was sentenced to 90 days and then released back to Hungary. There he was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor and put in a boxcar with other Jews and gypsies to be taken to work in a German training camp.

After he helped build the camp, he was transferred to the custody of the SS and taken to Poland.

“The SS guards were really rough on us,” Stern said. “I was hit in the face with a rifle butt and lost a tooth. I can’t tell you how many of my friends I helped bury in shallow graves across the country.”

Those who couldn’t work were killed with bayonets – to save bullets.

As World War II drew to a close, Stern and 48 of his fellow workers were transferred to another labor camp where they were liberated by Russian soldiers. He weighed only 88 pounds at the time. Two of the 48 who were liberated died within a day.

When he contacted his family, he learned that there were only five Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in his family.

“There were ten million victims of the Holocaust,” Stern said, including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and political dissidents. “We are forever grateful to the thousands of Christians who risked their own lives to save the lives of Jews.”

Stern was among the thousands who danced, sang, and cried in St. Peter’s Square after the creation of the State of Israel. In 1946, he immigrated to America under a student visa but did not enroll in school and did not have the proper paperwork to apply for legal status in the states.

“I was actually here illegally,” he said. “I was arrested, and I thought I would be deported to Hungary and end up in a communist labor camp.”

But the United States would not deport someone to a communist nation at the time. Later a law was passed by Congress that allowed Stern to naturalize here and become a citizen. He worked in New York for a time and eventually settled in Amarillo, where he lives today.

Stern said America is representative of the world because it includes people of every faith, religion, and creed; and Americans must show the world the way to live with respect for each other.

“If we cannot show the world that Americans can live in harmony, then there is no hope for the world, and a future Holocaust is inevitable.”

But Stern does not think that outcome is likely based on his experience in the USA.

“This is the best country in the world, and I can tell you from experience,” he said. “There are wonderful people here. Very tolerant.”

Stern’s speech came as the world prepares for Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is May 1.

After he finished, college students and community members lined up to shake his hand or hug him, many with tears in their eyes.

With no formal education beyond eight grades, Tibor Stern taught those in attendance a valuable lesson about history from a first hand perspective and helped insure that the horror of the Holocaust will never be forgotten.